


Advanced Psychological Analysis

by feeisamarshmallow



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Abed and Jeff have a lot in common, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Is this meta or fic?, Liberal use of headcanons, This is the hill I'll die on, Very brief allusion to disordered eating, You Decide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:35:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25184140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feeisamarshmallow/pseuds/feeisamarshmallow
Summary: "Jeff understands Abed more than he lets on. Maybe more than he even wants to admit to himself."Or, a look at the ways Jeff and Abed are similar, and how that forms the core of their relationship.
Relationships: Abed Nadir & Jeff Winger
Comments: 10
Kudos: 71





	Advanced Psychological Analysis

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the wonderful [@suspended-in-gaffa.](https://suspended-in-gaffa.tumblr.com/)

Jeff understands Abed more than he lets on. Maybe more than he even wants to admit to himself. It’s why he rarely pushes back against Abed’s quirks, if you could call them that, with any real force. Like when Abed tries to manipulate the group into a sitcom-worthy conclusion, or sticks a camera in Jeff’s face instead of confronting his own emotions, or goes on about alternate, evil universes. Sure Jeff will tell Abed to shut up, but there’s no malice behind it. Jeff knows Abed can’t really change these things—it’s how he copes in the world.

Because there are things Jeff can’t change about himself, too. He’s not saying he couldn’t be better. He knows he should eat more and exercise less, and he at least hopes there’s a future where he’s happier and more settled in his own skin. But it seems to him that there are fundamental, unchangeable aspects of his discomfort and his insecurity that he can’t so much change as he can learn to live with. Or maybe he’s just been living this way so long he can’t imagine another reality. At minimum, he’s pretty sure not everyone feels the way he does.

It’s the best he can do to hide those things deep within himself. To act and charm his way into blending in with his surroundings. Unlike Abed, who is unabashed in his peculiarity, Jeff comes off as relatively functional and well-adjusted. But the truth is he and Abed have a lot in common. He’s sure a qualified psychologist might have some insight into the ways he and Abed are different, too, but then again, neither him nor Abed have recently been to a psychologist anyway.

Abed always positions himself a little apart from the rest of the study group. He cocks his head as he watches them sit around the study table and analyzes each person’s every move. Jeff never truly feels part of the group either. He has learned to slouch against the wall, half-scroll through his phone, and smile enough so no one notices how he can never quite let loose. Although he understands social cues in a way Abed doesn’t, Jeff can never fully trust that the group likes him, can never quite believe they’ll really stick around, and so he holds them at arms’ length . Even though it’s been years since he was a lawyer, he can’t quite shake the urge to size up each member of the group, analyze what makes them tick and how that might benefit him. Maybe that’s why Abed asked Jeff to help him connect with people—Jeff connects with the study group in a way Abed can understand and replicate. Because Jeff gets it. He knows what it’s like to belong, and yet never quite belong at the same.

Abed just wants to fit in—no, that’s not it exactly. Abed just wants to be accepted. Didn’t Jeff want the exact same thing as a lawyer? Didn’t he seek desperate acceptance from peers who he knew were different from him? They had money. They had gone to college. Out of state, no less. Some of them had even travelled abroad. So Jeff learned to talk like them and look like them until he almost believed he belonged. It’s a skill that he’s thankful for that Abed doesn’t quite have.

No, that’s not true, either. Abed is an exceptional mimic. He impersonates celebrities and movie characters with uncanny accuracy. Maybe it’s just that Abed is braver. He looks around at the study group, at his classmates, at his family, and decides it doesn’t matter whether they get him or not. Abed doesn’t compromise himself for the comfort of others. Jeff can’t do that. Can’t even fathom not putting up a front and showing others only the Jeff they want to see: The dick-who-just-wants-to-get-in-your-pants Jeff. The ripped-leading-man-sex-god Jeff. The smarmy-rich-asshole-lawyer Jeff. Jeff can play them all so well that he has everyone fooled.

Here’s a secret: It’s not that Jeff’s lazy, it’s that he’s not good at school. He isn’t stupid—he really was a good lawyer. But he’s a terrible student. It takes him twice as long as the rest of the study group to read a textbook chapter. And he has to read it twice to truly comprehend it. He hates spelling in English, let alone remembering Spanish verb conjugations. All the convoluted anthropology terms were hell to remember, and that’s not even considering the pages of biology definitions he was supposed to memorize. Instead he pretends to scroll through his phone and waits for Annie to give up and tell him the homework answers.

Most of all, it’s dumb because Jeff doesn’t need to memorize words or write essays to be successful. He’s a good public speaker. He can remember anything after he’s heard it once (unfortunately all of Greendale’s teachers were useless in their lectures). Britta would probably tell him to go to student services and try to get extra time on his exams, but she doesn’t understand how admitting to this issue would open the door to admitting to all his other issues. So the study group doesn’t know: He has had a lifetime of practice in fooling people into believing he’s lazy instead of struggling. If anyone suspects anything it’s Abed, who sometimes wordlessly shares his notes with Jeff. But Abed is a vault when it comes to other’s secrets. (Unless he intentionally uses secrets as leverage to get something; a characteristic Jeff admits they share).

Once Jeff conned his way into a Bachelor’s degree and cheated his way through the LSATs and law school, it got easier. He eventually had assistants to do all his reading and research, but more often than not, Jeff relied on his memory, instinct, and ability to speak off the cuff about anything. Because he wasn’t stupid; he knew he could never fake his way as a high-powered corporate lawyer. But as a well-respected, mid-range defense lawyer no one suspected a thing. Lawyers were a funny, insecure bunch, and cautious flattery and subtle manipulation paved the way for a solid career.

Even Jeff’s decision to pursue law was a careful calculation. He had known since his parents’ divorce case that law seemed to hinge on who could construct the more convincing reality. So when he opened his abysmal results after rewriting his SATs (before he perfected his ability to cheat on standardized tests), he figured law was a career in which he could fake his way to success, all while attaining the best standard of living possible. It was a career that carried prestige. It paid well. And as far as he could tell, he just had to keep talking until everyone believed him. Of course that had all fallen apart when Allen found out about his phony Bachelor’s degree. He had been cocky trying to pass off his degree as from Columbia. If he could go back and do it again, he would fake a Bachelor’s degree from a small, middle-of-the-pack college that’s less likely to grab the attention of colleagues. But he was young and inexperienced then.

He still has a hard time feeling remorseful for the way he cheated his way into a law career. Maybe he would feel bad if he were a bad lawyer, but he wasn’t. (Well, he may have gotten a bunch of grade-A douchebags off of charges, but that was what he was supposed to do). The way Jeff sees it, he still put a lot of work into his career, it just wasn’t the same type of work his peers had put in. If the world’s not going to make it easy for him, he’s going to have to bend the rules so he can succeed.

So when Jeff sees Abed construct elaborate ways to align the outside world to his own TV-infused reality, Jeff gets it. When Abed insists that everyone has magically transformed into Claymation or when he sees the floor as lava, or an empty bedroom as some sort of virtual reality playground, Jeff gets it. It’s weird, and not at all like Jeff’s long history of faking his way through life, but it’s the same sort of underlying coping mechanism. Where Britta, Shirley, or even Annie try to talk Abed out of his delusions, Jeff understands that vital, visceral need to somehow rearrange the world into a place in which he can fit, or at least cope. Because Jeff catches the way Abed looks sometimes as he stands to the side of the study group. It’s not sad, necessarily, but it is lonely. Jeff knows that feeling—that sinking feeling of knowing you might be able to fool others, but you can’t fool yourself into belonging.

And then there’s Abed’s particularity. He eats the same foods, puts his DVDs back in the same precise order, watches the same movies on the same nights with the same people. Abed needs those routines, those islands of solidity in an ever-changing and confusing world. He’s seen Abed break down when those constants are torn away from him—the high keening sound he makes and the way his face goes blank and he doesn’t talk to anyone.

Jeff just avoids ever having to confront his constants changing. It’s one of the reasons he lives alone—the ability to do exactly what he wants at exactly the time he wants. He eats one of the same four or five high-protein, low-carb meals for dinner. He follows a precise workout routine at the same time every day. He drinks the same type of scotch from the same glass with the same line-up of stupid reality TV that he pretends he doesn’t like but really is very invested in. He can’t sleep unless he follows his 30-step skin care regime.

The difference between him and Abed, though, is that Jeff’s particularities are more acceptable, more easily rationalized as things that are normal to fixate on. So everyone looks at Abed and sees a gawky twentysomething kid who can perfectly recite the TV guide’s nightly lineup, but has no interest in polite smalltalk, and who lives in a world of TV tropes and plain buttered noodles. They peg him as endearingly quirky at best, or ridicule him at worst. When everyone looks at Jeff, they see a thirtysomething who’s into fitness and healthy eating—a lawyer who can spin inspirational speeches out of thin air. They call him successful or put-together. People draw an arbitrary line so that Abed is weird and Jeff is normal. But Jeff knows better, and he thinks, so does Abed.

Jeff is certainly not perfect. There are times when he snaps at Abed, because he snaps at the whole study group. Or because Abed has fixated on something at the absolute worst time, and Jeff doesn’t have the patience for it because his dad might be showing up any moment. More than once he’s gotten physical with Abed and had to return and apologize (after having a panic attack in the bathroom about turning into his father). Sometimes Abed’s particularities and Jeff’s own particularities clash, and Jeff just has to walk away before he blows up.

But Jeff likes to think that, even without saying anything, he and Abed have a sort of understanding of each other. A pact that they won’t try to judge or fix one another. When there’s no one else around and Jeff is able to drop his cool act, he lets himself enjoy TV and movies with Abed. He feels his shoulders relax as he lets go of his fear that someone might see through him. Or more accurately, Abed might be able to see through him, but he gets it, so Jeff doesn’t care. Jeff lets Abed’s endless TV analysis wash over him as Abed fiddles absentmindedly with an action figure. Abed smiles, a brief quirk of his lips, and that makes Jeff smile too.

Someday Jeff hopes he’ll be able to tell Abed the truth: That Abed’s casual confidence has changed Jeff’s life. That it made him realize, ever so slightly, that he doesn’t need to work so hard to hide every part of himself. But until then, he just hopes he can be a decent friend.

**Author's Note:**

> I've sat on the finished draft of this fic for a while, because I was afraid that this fic would come off as trying to diagnosing Abed and/or Jeff. It's not. At the same time, I didn't want to sound like I was purposely avoiding diagnoses (particularly for Abed who is pretty much canon autistic). I ultimately landed on the explanation that, while this is a character study, it's still a fic from Jeff's POV (or more accurately his subconscious) and he wouldn't have the understanding or resources to give any sort of official diagnosis. It's handy because I also don't feel comfortable doing that. At the same time, much of this fic is drawn from my own experiences, or listening to other's experiences, so I do stand by what I've written. 
> 
> Secondly, the part about Jeff finding school more difficult than his peers was partly inspired by interviews with Joel McHale talking about his own experiences in high school/college with undiagnosed dyslexia. I'm very interested in the fact that Jeff chose to fake his whole degree instead of actually going to a school and figuring whatever way to graduate. To me, that can't just be out of laziness - maybe it was a financial thing, but I figured it also could be a deliberate decision to avoid a situation that was difficult for him. Again, I went back and forth about whether I wanted to include this, but I figured that actors do make up a significant part of who the character is, and there are lots of instances of Community borrowing from the actor's lives for their characters. 
> 
> So I guess that's my longwinded disclaimer. At the end of the day, these are just headcanons, but I do really love exploring the ways that Abed and Jeff relate to each other. Do tell me what you think, though (but be nice). Also feel free to come say hi on tumblr [@feeisamarshmallow.](https://feeisamarshmallow.tumblr.com/)


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